Medicare for All: A Single Solution to the Health Care Fracas

It will take some time to digest the Supreme Court's
decision yesterday, but it appears to have averted some terrible
jurisprudence that might have very seriously restricted the government's
overall ability to regulate the economy and protect citizens.

In upholding most of the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme
Court lets stand legislation that offers some important benefits, but only to a
portion of those who are uninsured, and will predictably fail to solve our
nation's health care crisis.

However the health reform law ultimately plays out, we know
two things for certain: Tens of millions of
Americans will remain uncovered as will tens of millions of
under-insured who will remain at risk of financial ruin if a major illness
strikes; and it will leave the private health insurance and pharmaceutical
industries in charge of prices and life-and-death treatment decisions.

There is a single solution to the challenges of providing
coverage to the 50 million who are uninsured that would curb out-of-control
health care costs and provide a humane standard of care to all who enter the
medical system. That solution is an improved Medicare-for-All, single-payer
system.

The improved Medicare-for-All approach starts with the
premise that health care is a critically needed right that must be afforded to
all, irrespective of any individual's ability to pay for care. It solves the
problems of 50 million uninsured Americans simply and directly by establishing
that everyone is covered by the improved Medicare-for-All system. Everybody in,
nobody out.

The improved Medicare-for-All approach would eliminate the
greatest waste in the health care system: the needless costs imposed by the private
health insurers.

Improved Medicare-for-All would prevent the deaths of the 45,000 Americans
who die every year from lack of health insurance. It would eliminate
the hundreds of
thousands of medical bankruptcies—affecting millions of Americans
every year—that occur because people can't pay their medical bills. These
deaths and economic tragedies are entirely preventable; a system that permits
them to continue is morally repugnant and must be replaced.

The improved Medicare-for-All approach would eliminate the
greatest waste in the health care system: the needless costs imposed by private
health insurers. These firms impose hundreds of billions of dollars of excess cost on us via excessive profit-taking and executive compensation, marketing expenses, vast bureaucracies devoted to denying care, and imposition of massive paper-pushing obligations on actual health care providers.

It is not for lack of policy justification or moral force
that Americans continue to suffer from a malfunctioning health care system. Our
failure to have adopted an improved Medicare-for-All system is due in large part to
the political power of
the health insurance industry.

That political power can be overcome, however, by a
grassroots movement that musters enough of its own power. The country cannot
continue to survive the continued reign of the private health insurance
industry, and it will not.

Our
failure to have adopted an improved Medicare-for-All system is due entirely to
the political power of
the health insurance industry.

Winning a single-payer system will not be
easy. In the near term, the single-payer movement will need to devote
substantial energy to holding off efforts to further privatize and weaken existing
Medicare.

The early steps forward in winning expanded and improved
Medicare-for-All will likely come from state initiatives, where success will
depend on local movements plus assurances that states pursuing improved
Medicare-for-All can obtain needed waivers from federal laws and rules.

But there should be no doubt about what must ultimately be
achieved. We can no longer tolerate a system that pointlessly kills
45,000 fellow Americans a year. For those who doubt the political potency of
this moral imperative, consider that economic facts counsel just as strongly for an improved
Medicare-for-All system.

We can be our brother's (and sister's) keeper and be
cost-effective at the same time. Indeed, it turns out that being cost effective
requires that we take care of each other.

Interested?

Why truly affordable care means single-payer.

The state’s progressive health care model has already bolstered campaigns in more than 20 other places.

To create universal care, Governor Brian Schweitzer is taking a hint
from Saskatchewan—where the people live longer and it costs less, too.

Robert Weissman is president of Public Citizen, a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. Public Citizen has supported a single-payer system since its founding more than four decades ago. For more information on its advocacy for a single-payer system, please visit www.citizen.org.